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EOSS-199 NOAA LASP Flight Recap

Submitted by KCØRPS on Sun, 07/19/2015 - 15:12

EOSS-199 was flown Saturday September 27th from Eaton. Because of concerns about shock to the fiber optic cable during launch, we used a hand-over-hand launch technique, which is not something we normally do at EOSS. It did result in a very smooth launch. Unfortunately, while lowering the fiber there was a failure of some sort that caused the fiber to fracture. The "fin" was recoverd from a back yard in Eaton with ~30 feet of fiber still attached.

The rest of the flight went smoothly, except for a significant variation from the predict. Total flight distance was only 6 miles downrange. Recovery was simple, the payloads landed on a maintenence road for an irrigation canal. We did dodge a bit of a bullet, because the canal was still very wet!

This is the first flight for the NOAA/LASP Tropopause Temperature Profiling experiment and will be a standard EOSS flight, with no attempt to do a "floater". The goal here is an in-flight test of the Fiberoptic Temperature Profiler (FTP) that will reel out a length of optical fiber with an End of Fiber (EOF) dongle weighting 0.7 lb. The launch procedure is at http://wxqa.com/PPTs.html under "EOSS199 Launch Procedure.docx". The plan is to launch with the FTP at the bottom of the flight string and then deploy the EOF on the ascent, between 13,500 and 80,000 feet MSL and retract it before burst. The trajectory predictions from day7 to day 1 are under "EOSS199_7-1.gif" Flight Prediction